Small digital device to detect gluten!!!

[weee]

Is this the future?

mashable.com/2013/11/26/tel...

[HiveMind]

Wow! Is this for real?? If so, it's WONDERFUL!!!

[weee]

I think its something being developed.. I actually doubt anything could detect gluten, I'm dubious.. But I need to do some more research

[beau_alicia]

that sounds amazing. and theres no reason to be dubious - gluten is a chemical molecule like anything else, as is sugar, fat etc etc. spectroscopy is widely used in chemistry to determine chemical structures, i will definitely be getting one of these when they come to the uk and are affordable for me.

(P.S i am a medicinal and biological chemistry student at university)

[weee]

I'm not sure how far the technology is away from becoming reality, but if it works ..

Wow..

[DartmoorGuerrilla]

I wouldn't trust a device like this without understanding its sensitivity and specificity. If you can't trust it 100% every time, then it won't ever be anything more than a toy.

Besides, even if it were 100% accurate are you going to scan every mouthful of your meal? Contamination could be buried and this device can only scan the surface.

Sorry to burst any bubbles but I think this could actually be dangerous because (a) it moves the onus off the food producer/provider and (b) it will produce a certain level of false negatives making people complacent and potentially very ill.

[Yossarian]

It uses a technique called Raman spectroscopy which is a well established technique and can be used to detect gluten. (E.g. used in this study to analyse gluten: sciencedirect.com/science/a... ). Conversely however, this article found that when looking for gluten in bread crusts at least, there was interference from other compounds when using raman spectroscopy, making it an inappropriate method. Although it may be that the Tellspec uses a different wavelength to circumvent this.

Tellspec cite the success rate of the machine in their own internal tests as being approx 97 %. The issue will be the accuracy and therefore adequacy for coeliacs. 97% is not sufficient for people looking for a 20ppm guarantee which translates to 99.9980% accuracy requirement?

Interesting concept though and if perfected would be life-changing.

[Lexy]

The thing that interests me is that this alleged detector is to recognise elements that we already know are harmful to us - ie WHY are we putting them in our food/water/buildings??? Surely the onus is on us as a society to stop using and ingesting elements that are dangerous for our bodies and our overall health. We already have the evidence that proves the damage these things can do, so why are companies allowed to continue using them and putting them into our food and our ecosystem? I think that is by far the more important issue and the one which needs to be tackled.

[Yossarian in reply to Lexy]

This "alleged detector" is meant to recognise gluten, sugar, nuts, eggs, calorie count, etc. Are you suggesting that we remove all these "elements" from everyones diet / from the entire food chain?

[Lexy in reply to Yossarian]

The article talked about the 'detector' being used to discover mould and penicillin in buildings as well as tartrazine, I believe, in certain cheetos. Perhaps you read a different article?

[philaustin]

If this can be made to work and be 100% accurate it will be brilliant. Just what we need. I can imagine problems though, as it stands. The gluten could be 'buried' in the food, away from the sample that it analyses. Not many meals are homogeneous. Not even soup or porridge. Without taking some of each part of a meal, whisking it up in an uncontaminated liquid in an uncontaminated container to distribute any gluten molecules evenly then scanning the sample I don't see how it could work. Its a bit like trying to predict if there is oil underground by looking at a sample of soil on the surface. However, if it scans an area of food and enough slices are taken through a meal and each slice is scanned it might be possible to almost detect if the meal might contain gluten, without much certainty.